JailbreakMe: Half a million devices jailbroken on day one

Last night JailbreakMe 3.0 went live. It’s a tool that allows you to jailbreak your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch just by opening your web browser, visiting JailbreakMe.com, and clicking a few buttons. It’s without a doubt the easiest way to jailbreak an iOS device, and it also happens to be the first method for jailbreaking an iPad 2.

JailbreakMe seems to have fostered a bit of excitement. Chpwn reports that the web site has already received a million hits and people have used it to jailbreak devices 500,000 times.

There are clearly plenty of iOS users who will never bother to jailbreak their devices at all. But this number is either an indication that there are a lot of iPad 2 users who were just waiting for something to come along, or a lot of people who were just looking for an easier way to jailbreak. Existing tools such as redsn0w and sn0wbreeze aren’t exactly complicated, but they’re nowhere near as easy to use as the new web-based exploit.